EVENTS

Mabus re-arrested and re-released

This post is the story of how those posts once again led to Markuze’s arrest by the Montreal Police. As in 2011 it took quite a bit of work to make this happen. Tedious, painstaking, often thankless work. But this is the type of work skeptic activists need to be ready to do in order to get results.

Really – incredibly tedious and painstaking. I find it tedious just taking a screenshot; the thought of tracking down endless IP addresses makes me want to run away and join the circus. Thank you Tim. (Remember – Tim also did the tedious work of finding and talking to the guy who sent me those two weird emails last June. [You know: the ones that included, at the end of the second one, a prediction that I would be shot at TAM; the part that Justin Vacula left out on his podcast when he poured scorn on the idea that I had received any threats at all.] I have good reason to be grateful to him.)

Tim goes through the details, and then arrives at the outcome, last May.

Markuze Pleads Guilty on May 22, 2012

Because of the sparse communication from Montreal, we had no idea that these YouTube posts in May were coming just days before Markuze was scheduled to appear in court on Tuesday, May 22, 2012. And again we heard nothing about that until an article appeared in the Montreal Gazette on Friday, June 1st titled “St. Laurent man pleads guilty to issuing threats.” I’d link to the article, but it is no longer available online. (Yet another reason newspapers continue to get trounced by new media – they keep trashing or paywalling content like this that could be bringing people to their site).

The gist was that Markuze pled guilty to eight counts of “uttering threats,” and was given a suspended 18-month sentence as a result. He was ordered to “abstain from particpating in a social network, blog and discussion forum” as part of the sentence.

Ordered to, but that turned out to mean…nothing much. Nobody made sure he obeyed, and by golly, he didn’t.

Needless to say, many of us were disappointed in this outcome, and particularly that we had to learn about it from the newspaper. We wanted to ensure that Markuze would get good treatment and supervision, which he clearly needs. This report doesn’t give one confidence that was going to happen.

Supervision, so that he wouldn’t…you know…put the threats into action.

So…he went back to his old habits, and Tim did lots more tedious work to help the police see what he was doing, and finally he was arrested again.

I got a call from Paul Cherry, who told me that Markuze had been arrested on Friday November 16, 2012, arraigned on Saturday and released on Monday pending a hearing. You can read the rest of the details in his account in the Gazette.

On Tuesday morning I got a call from the detective. She thanked me for my help but apologized a bit for the court’s decision to release him. She said, “I’m a little bit discouraged” by the court’s decision. I hope this is not a sign we are headed down the same path again.